Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Clap your hands if gas is too high

It’s just wonderful to watch our current and aspirant bosses claw at each other over the $4-a-gallon gas their weary citizens are now paying. They do so without breathing a hint of criticism over the role of Israeli war-makers in the price run-up, which promises to turn ever more severe. Romney lays the blame on Obama for vetoing the environmentally disastrous Keystone pipeline as if that would put a dent in the world market prices while the White House lamely replies that they’ve opened up everything but Yosemite National Park to new oil drilling. All sides eagerly pander to the nonsense notion that the U.S. could be self-sufficient in petroleum.

The News Hour says part of the Obama push-back will be criticism of the ridiculous subsidies provided to wealthy oil companies. However, given the need for a billion dollars in campaign funds with which to torture us for the next nine months, let’s not hold our collective breath in anticipation of any such Occupy-ish rhetoric.

What no one dares to suggest is that the Israeli saber-rattling and the Iranian mullahs’ predictable answers are raising the threat of a dangerous supply interruption in the lake of Persian Gulf oil, thus producing speculation in oil prices. In fact, the Iranians are deploying the price weapon—one of the few at their disposal—quite adroitly and as predicted. But because Israeli interests are more sacred than our own, the steady insistence that we generate yet more horrific carnage in the region only pops up as a topic so that candidates can twit Obama as a wimp over the-Iranian-nukes-that-were-not.

Meanwhile, absolutely no one connects the dotted line between the sudden enthusiasm for this war and its direct consequences on the domestic household budget. If Obama ever dared suggest such a link, the pro-Israel money would open up on him like a fleet of B-52s.

At the same time, Israeli P.M. Netanyahu acts like he’s the real authority in Washington, and in a way, he is. When Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ie, the highest-ranking military official of the United States, dared to say that an attack on Iran now was ‘not prudent’, Netanyahu said he was ‘serving Iranian interests’. How the patriots would howl if anyone here at home dared to talk about our trusty generals that way! Hey, why not add, ‘Islamofascist appeaser’, ‘Quran-hugger’ and ‘mullah-symp’?

The whole episode is actually a good illustration of how the Republican Party has slipped into seditious disloyalty by surrendering to its increasingly reactionary wing. As with their destructive assault on the federal government over the debt limit, the fringe elements that have taken over the GOP casually inflicted deep wounds on the country in defense of their ideological goals, secretly whispered to them by the Heavenly Father. Now, these include the next round of the Rapture-inducing great battle for Zion. No wonder Confederate flags are making a comeback.